Commissioners caught between rock and a hard place

WITH less than a year to go before the end of its term, a ‘lame-duck’ European Commission is bound to be an easy target for its critics.

European Voice

11/19/03, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 4/12/14, 9:25 AM CET

Right now, they seem to be queuing up to take potshots at the administration and, particularly, its president.

Romano Prodi has been having a torrid time of late.

He certainly didn’t thank this newspaper for airing concerns raised by Commission officials last week that a firm employing his niece may have received preferential treatment. (He later emphatically denied this was the case).

Prodi was also put on the defensive after strong criticism of his decision to publish a document called Europe: the dream, the choices, in which he appealed to the Italian opposition to unite ahead of next summer’s European elections.

Hans-Gert Pöttering, leader of the centre-right European People’s Party group in the European Parliament, has said the Commission president should resign if he wants to pursue party-political issues.

We have some sympathy with Prodi on this.

While it may have been a tactical error to release his reflections during the Italian presidency of the EU, there can be no denying that the Commission is an “increasingly political body”, as the Financial Times quoted him as saying this week.

One only has to recall the row surrounding Vice-President Loyola de Palacio’s efforts last year to sink reforms to the Common Fisheries Policy.

At the time, it seemed she was speaking more on behalf of the Spanish government than the European taxpayer.

And only last weekend, Frits Bolkestein, the internal market commissioner, was bashing France and Germany for failing to stick to the terms of the EU Stability and Growth Pact (see Page 14).

Was he expressing the official Commission line, or was he giving a party-political view when he spoke out at the European Liberal Democrat and Reform party summit in Amsterdam?

Fortunately for him, the two positions coincided nicely in this case.

The truth is, commissioners are caught between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, they owe their positions to the governments that nominate them; on the other, they know they are supposed to be representing the ‘Community interest’.

So how far can, or should, they go? It all boils down to a question of balance.

Prodi’s document would seem, on reflection, to be within the bounds of reasonable action.

Speaking in Strasbourg this week, Pöttering complained that Prodi’s remarks “create the impression that some parties are the better reformers and the better Europeans”.

The Commission president clearly believes that and is entitled to say as much.

THE Commission’s other Vice-President, Neil Kinnock, is also in the firing line this week.

The Welshman is attacked by the staff unions, who reckon his career-development review reforms are flawed.

Their criticisms put one in mind of Winston Churchill’s description of democracy as “the worst form of government except all those other forms which have been tried”.

Kinnock’s reforms, aimed at achieving a fair assessment of performance and promotion on merit, are crucial for the credibility of the Commission.

They may not be perfect, but they are most certainly a step in the right direction.

The keynote speaker at the 20th anniversary celebration of the European Medicines Agency offered some challenges to conventional thinking about the next 20 years – including carefully calculated provocations of his hosts.